Leslie and Andrew Cockburn
I went to see American Casino with all the anticipatory urgency that this complicated subject of mortgages gone awry and left feeling even more confused. Only now I am certain I will never understand the world of finance that has seriously diminished the quality of my life and destroyed the lives of many I know and have heard about.
Why:
For starters, the film makers never defined the sub-prime mortgage. An entire film/documentary based on a term without defining it. Or maybe the definition was there, amid all those words and ideas and talking heads(no simple graphs) but I didn't get it. So I asked a knowledgeable friend. What is sub-prime because I can't find anything that is sub(meaning less) in the mortgages.
The words left out told the story. They are sub-prime interest rate mortgages meaning that if the prime or the set mortgage rate is 5% the borrower is offered a mortgage at 4% or one interest rate point less than the going rate.
Great. I now know that the variable rate mortgage and the sub-prime interest rate mortgage or not one and the same instrument.
A veritable rate mortgage is one that every few years gets reset dependent on..........well, that is not defined What factors do and what factors don't get counted. When the cost of living goes up does the veritable rate when calculated three years later go down or does it go up with the rest of the bills I have to pay? Is this the reason why I can't pay my mortgage or is it the hidden costs that the seller didn't tell me about when I bought the mortgage.
This is just some of the elementary definitions that the documentary assumed the viewer knows.
Then there is the problem of what happens to my money. For instance, if I buy a mortgage I am giving a set sum of money that is then bundled with other money and sold over and over again. This way I don't know who owes my mortgage. And neither does anyone else.
I understand, because of this film that each sale means someone makes money from my original purchase and I understand that many clever people, people who don't have to be told the difference between the sub-prime rate and the veritable rate mortgage, can and do bet on my inability to pay back my mortgage.
I am not without some knowledge of finance. I remember when my parents bought the car and paid car payments and if or when they failed to pay the car payments, the car was repossessed. This applied to furniture as well.
I remember thinking about this and realized that the "down payment" was usually sufficient to pay for the cost of the car or the dining room table and every payment made by my parents was profit for the seller. I understand that every payment I DO NOT make on my mortgage is profit to the seller and the buyer, neither of whom I know or ever will.
Is this what is still going on with mortgages today? Going on without laws to curb the practice?
When "the men" come with the foreclosure and I ask, where is the mortgage, the papers to verify who actually owns my house and they can't produce the owner, then how can they take back what they can't prove is theirs? Or when they auction my house, who are they auctioning it for? The bank? But the Bank doesn't have the mortgage papers. Or does it. And are the mortgage papers different from the ownership documents?
These are questions worth full exploration but unfortunately the authors of this film were so intent on exposing the key players that they forgot about you and me, the buyers of their product.
American Casino reinforces the now well understood reality that the power elite who are deemed crooks,(not in jail but free range in all the high places in Government) are operating American Financial Casino(s) without the American public or the world financial complex aware of what they are involved in.
I understand that the poor, the black, the upper striving people of color were for a single moment called "stupid"in the film because they got caught in this night-mere of fulfilling the "American dream" that they might never have had if it hadn't been for ex-president Bush calling the ownership of a home of one's own an American goal; a fantasy to strive towards. I understand that the makers of this film had no idea who their audience is and to put a group of people on the screen to show the devastating impact of this scandal without presenting the fundamentals borders on........... an act of intellectual snobbery.
That said, many will talk about American Casino. And if you should ask, what is it really all about, be prepared to feel once again how "stupid" you and I really are. But then again maybe there is something good to be said about being stupid. We are in good ethical, upstanding citizen company suffering from the fall out of financial giants.
Linda ZISES
WBAI Women's Collective
No comments:
Post a Comment